Heidegger and the Educated Life

Abstract

Martin Heidegger's interest in ancient Greek philosophy, especially the work of Plato and Aristotle, has incited speculation about the source of some of the problems in Heidegger's own work. It is thought that certain problems in Plato and Aristotle make their way into Heidegger's thought, without him being aware of it. One of those problems has to do with whether Heidegger is advocating a certain kind of life or if he really has anything to say about life at all. One of the people who has criticized what Heidegger has to say about life is his well-known student, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who claims that Heidegger's philosophy does not tell us anything meaningful about practical life. This sentiment is echoed by others, and in particular by those who are interested in what Heidegger has said about Plato and Aristotle. Interestingly, the conclusion reached by the Platonic and the Aristotelian critiques of Heidegger's work is a similar one: in Being and Time, Dasein becomes, through the call of conscience, a radically individualized entity, separated from others. The consequences of this radical individualization range from the fairly minor (it contradicts everything he says about Dasein as Being-in-the-world with others in Being and Time and what he later says about the relation between human beings and things in the world, such as art, architecture, poetry, and technology) to the catastrophic (insofar as it lends philosophical credibility to Nazi Germany's social and cultural isolation). But if the conclusions reached are the same, the premises are different. One critique claims that Heidegger's call of conscience derives from what Plato says in the Republic about the soul in dialogue with itself.1 If so, then the problem of Dasein's radical individualization can be traced back to Heidegger's affinity with Plato. Another critique claims that Dasein's radical isolation can be traced back to Aristotle's claim at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics that the highest form of life is the contemplative life.2 In this essay, I do not intend to say that either of these critiques is wrong. On the contrary, I think that they are both right, at least insofar as each claims that there is a tension in Heidegger's philosophy between what he says about the world and what he says about Dasein's radical individualization. Moreover, I believe that tracing this tension back to Greek philosophy is justified, considering Heidegger's profound interest in the Greeks and the influence they had on him. Indeed, one finds this same tension in both Plato and Aristotle: in Plato's Republic the tension can be seen in what he says about the philosopher who wants to contemplate the forms but must return to the cave to engage in political activity. And at the end of Aristotle's Ethics, which focuses on how to live an active moral life, he claims that the contemplative is the highest form of life. What I do not agree with is the idea that this suggests some kind of contradiction, in Plato, Aristotle, or Heidegger. Aristotle's claim about the highest form of life does not contradict everything he said about action; nor does what Plato says about the contemplative philosopher contradict his claim that the philosophers must serve as politicians. What is thought to be a contradiction is really a tension and, I think, a productive one. To show what I mean by that, I would like to suggest in this paper that Heidegger is proposing a certain kind of life, a thoughtful and contemplative, yet still active and public life. There are different ways to go about doing this, and many interpreters have done so. Primarily, Heidegger's defenders have endeavored to show that his early philosophy is proto-practical, prior to the distinction between theoretical and practical, but in a sense more practical in that he is interested in the Being of practical human life. In this essay, I would like to take a different approach by looking at Heidegger's early and late readings of Plato as a way of suggesting that the kind of life Heidegger is advocating is similar to the philosophical life as that is embodied in the figure of Socrates. …